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E-book Ploughshares and Swords : India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War

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Penilaian

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A major corporate scandal broke out in London in 1916. It was over German control of monazite sands in the princely state of Tiruvitamkur, anglicized as Travancore, in British India. Travancore was home to one of the world’s largest monazite deposits. Monazite was a major source of thorium nitrate used in incandescent gas mantles for street lighting— a cheap alternative to electric lights. The discovery at the height of the First World War that thorium nitrate shipped to Britain originating from Travancore’s monazite was actually pro cessed in Germany shook the British gas mantle industry.1The German leader in incandescent lighting, Auergesellschaft, had invested huge sums of capital in the British firm Travancore Minerals Com pany. By the time German economic involvement in Travancore came to light, the Auercom pany already held “the whole of the preference shares and eleven thou-sand ordinary shares” of the British com pany in its trust.2 The economic im-plication was that the British gas mantle industry was paying nearly nine times the price for Travancore’s monazite than their German counterpart. The geopo liti cal repercussions of this wartime revelation convinced the India Of-fice in London to cancel all of the British com pany’s German contracts and hire only British- born directors.3The intersection of capital, geology, and geopolitics in Travancore’s monazite-rich sands reemerged during the Second World War with the need for thorium in nuclear fission. For the first forty years of the twentieth century, the chief commercial purpose of thorium was to light up gas mantles, but its radioactive properties were known to the scientific world owing to Marie Curie and Ger-hard Carl Schmidt’s research. In the 1940s, Glenn Seaborg and his team at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago began to research thorium for the Manhat-tan Proj ect. Seaborg found that uranium-233 bred from thorium was fissile, such that a nuclear fuel cycle using thorium could be used in breeder reactors.4The breakthrough that thorium had applications in nuclear fission trans-formed thorium- bearing monazite sands into “atomic earths” and Travancore into a fraught turf of territorial claims and counterclaims.5 The Anglo- American stockpiling of rare earths and minerals during and immediately after the Second World War brought multiple geopo liti cal actors to Travancore’s coast. The monazite- rich sands metamorphosed from lucrative commodities into strategicmaterials. The kingdom of Travancore thus became the battleground where imperial and neoimperial forces, local elites, and new nation- states collided against each other.Decolonization in the South Asian subcontinent influenced the strategies of local and national elites for controlling Travancore’s monazite- bearing sands. Both the kingdom of Travancore and the soon- to-be in de pen dent Indian gov-ernment stalled external access to monazite in their contestations for sover-eign power. Sir C. P., the dewan of Travancore (a position equivalent to prime minister), used the monazite sands as the bargaining chip to keep the princely state in de pen dent of the Indian Union, albeit unsuccessfully.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

355.825119 SAR p

Penerbit

New York : Cornell University Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

301 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

978150176442

Klasifikasi

355.825119

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Nuclear Weapons, Atomic Weapons

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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